Wednesday, 10 December 2014

Chinese paramilitary police in Urumqi, Xinjiang, where Beijing says it is fighting a violent separatist campaign by Islamists. Photograph: Goh Chai Hin/AFP/Getty
China and North Korea, two of the nations most often criticised by the US over human rights, have lined up to return fire after the Senate published its damning report on the CIA’s use of torture to interrogate captives suspected of terrorist involvement.
Even before the report had been released, China’s state news agency Xinhua carried an editorial saying the US “should clean up its own backyard first and respect the rights of other countries to resolve their issues by themselves”.
Citing the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, as well as the torture report, it added: “America is neither a suitable role model nor a qualified judge on human rights issues in other countries, as it pertains to be.
“Yet, despite this, people rarely hear the US talking about its own problems, preferring to be vocal on the issues it sees in other countries, including China.”
A Chinese court on Tuesday jailed six students of Ilham Tohti, a Uighur scholar from the Xinjiang region where there has been deadly violence that Beijing blames on Muslim separatists. The US issued a call for the students’ release.
The Xinhua report said China welcomed “friendly advice and suggestions” on its human rights issues but continued: “Should a country adopt double standards, being ‘loose’ domestically and ‘strict’ abroad, its contrasting principles could be taken as a disregard for human rights.
“What the US appears to be doing is defending its own national interests and wielding human rights issues as a political tool.”
North Korea, facing unprecedented pressure over domestic human rights abuses since a scathing United Nations report denounced it for crimes against humanity earlier this year, embraced the release of the torture report.
Its state news agency KCNA urged the United Nations security council to address the US record. The North is increasingly anxious about its own position; last month the UN general assembly’s human rights committee approved a resolution urging the security council to refer Pyongyang to the international criminal court in The Hague.

Kim Jong-un’s regime in North Korea is facing possible referral to the international criminal court in The Hague over human rights. Photograph: Xinhua/Landov/Barcroft Media
“Why the UNSC is turning its face from the inhuman torture practiced by the CIA over which the UN anti-torture committee expressed particular concern and which is dealt with in the 6, 000 page-long report presented by the intelligence committee of the US Senate, and such despicable human rights abuses as white American policemen’s brutalities of shooting and strangling black men to death,” said a KCNA commentary published on Tuesday.
“If the UNSC handles the ‘human rights issue’ in the DPRK [North Korea] while shutting its eyes to the serious human rights issue in the US, one of its permanent members, while failing to settle the pending and urgent issues directly linked with the world peace and security, it will prove itself its miserable position that it has turned into a tool for US arbitrary practices just as everybody can hear everywhere.from theguardiad